2006-10-29

I'm reading a very interesting post at the "Gates of Vienna" blog (that's an amazing name for a blog, incidently). It tells of a Swedish man in trouble with a "Centre Against Racism" because he wrote that he wanted an apartment away from multiculturalism and crime. He disseminates the various claims of the Centre, including associating them with 1984 and Cool Hand Luke, before getting onto a discussion about a computer program that models ethnic clumping in cities. Something I might want to run for Edmonton...

Bonus "Gates of Vienna" factoid: I think I've mentioned this before, but King Jan Sobieski of Poland defended Vienna against the Muslim hordes in a battle that ended in the wee hours of September 12, 1683...making Vienna the "other" September 11th

Update, 2:45pm: The software doesn't allow you to change, say, the size of the city (N=712391), the percentages of the population groups (G1=0.7569, G2=0.1015, G3=0.0462, G4=0.0424, G5=0.0530) where G5 would be "other" and we would have to assume a 0% "hold" on that case. In that event, one could construct an interesting development of the City of Edmonton, assuming that we didn't go fancy and pre-configure ethnic clumps in areas of the city. This would be a modelling nightmare, of course, but what can you do?